Would Superman really stand in the way of improving the system as a whole?

See the NY magazine article by John Heilemann about “Waiting for Superman,” the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim and the latest example of charter school porn.

The article retreads the well-worn points made by countless other articles in the mainstream media, predictably focusing on the teacher unions as the scapegoats, adds in the tired nostrum of how "adults" are being favored over the kids, ignores all the factors that go into low-performance in our urban schools, and drools all over Geoffrey Canada.

But it also contains a startling quotation from Joel Klein, about the students who remain in the regular public schools:

“It’s gonna grab people much deeper than An Inconvenient Truth, because watching ice caps melt doesn’t have the human quality of watching these kids being denied something you know will change their lives,” Klein says. “It grabs at you. It should grab at you. Those kids are dying."

It's amazing to me that Joel Klein says the kids in the schools that he is responsible for running are "dying." If he feels that way he should resign immediately and let someone else be in charge -- preferably an educator who knows something about how to improve schools.

Geoffrey Canada's charter schools have class sizes of twenty or fewer in all grades, and yet the administration refuses to reduce class size to similar levels.

The Bloomberg/Klein administration has consistently refused to provide class sizes comparable to those in Canada's charters, despite hundreds of millions in state funds supposed to be used for that purpose. Essentially, by Klein's own malfeasance, he is creating a system in which many charters will outperform the schools he is responsible for improving.

Canada also claims that teacher unions have not added anything to the quality of education, yet without unions, class sizes in NYC would be essentially uncontrollable -- rising to 30 or more in all grades. The only thing that is keeping them from exploding are the union contractual limits.

Charter schools enroll far fewer special education, immigrant, poor and homeless kids than the districts in which they are located -- another reason for their relative success. Teacher attrition rates at charter schools tend to be sky high, because of lousy working conditions. This is not a model we want to replicate, as experience matters hugely in terms of teacher effectiveness. Student attrition also tends to be very high. I doubt that the Guggenheim film explores any of these factors.

Altogether this article, like the movie it profiles, is a simplistic and one-sided look at a complicated problem. For a far more informative and balanced perspective, check out Prof. Bruce Baker's analysis of charter schools at "Searching for Superguy in Gotham". As he concludes:

"...we might be better off spending this time, effort and our resources investing in the improvement of the quality of the system as a whole. Yeah, we can still give Superguy a chance to show himself (or herself), but let’s not hold our breath, and let’s do our part on behalf of the masses (not just the few) in the meantime."

Wishful Testing in this week's New York magazine

Check out the just-published piece in NY Magazine called Wishful Testing, featuring the comments of Steve Koss, blogger here, and which analyzes the state test score bubble, Campbell’s law, the over-hyped Harlem Village Academy, and connects the dots.

Between this, the recent Robert Kolker piece on the national craze of scapegoating teachers, and features by Jeff Coplon on Eva Moskowitz’ chain of charters and school overcrowding, the magazine has shown itself to be most valuable in dissecting the Bloomberg/Klein mirage.

Especially as compared to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, whose reporting on the subject has been execrable.

Read it and leave a comment on the website!!

The myth of the gifted child

Good article in this week’s New York Magazine by Jennifer Senior, about the myth of the gifted child – with only about 25% of children who were tested at age four as “gifted” repeating at 17.

It also reveals the unfairness of the administration's current admissions policies, based on strict cut-offs on high stakes tests, because the results are so highly biased in terms of race and class.

As one expert says, “Sometimes,” he says, “you look at a big city’s decisions to do this and wonder if it’s about nurturing giftedness or if it’s about keeping middle-class families in the city limits.”

NY Times contradicts itself; but after all, why not when Bloomberg owns this town?

I hope everyone remembers that NY Times was a great cheerleader for continued mayoral control – including his authority to appoint a supermajority of members to the Board of Education (which Bloomberg likes to call the Panel for Educational Policy, to make clear it has no real power to overrule him.) The paper also supported his overturning of term limits, without a peep of dissent.

Well, yesterday the Times came out with an editorial lambasting Albany, with a bunch of proposals , including that no one man should decide over state pension investments, as the State Comptroller currently does. Along with the State Attorney General, the editors agreed that there should be a thirteen member oversight board, with appointments made by various different state leaders and state employees:

New York’s comptroller is the sole trustee watching over $116.5 billion in pension investments. This should not be happening anywhere, but especially not in Albany.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has proposed a 13-member commission to manage pensions. The idea is a good one, requiring appointments to the board by state leaders and employees with pensions. But this new board should not become another parking place for political hacks. While we need a better system than one person controlling so much money, it must be done right — with a board picked for its financial expertise with fiduciary duties to protect the pension.

What about accountability for the spending of billions of dollars in tax funds for our public schools, and the policies that will doom our children either to success or failure? Funny, instead in the mind of the NY Times, this meant that one man alone, namely Bloomberg, should have total control.

In their endorsement of the Silver bill that continued mayoral control, the editors wrote in praise: “It would preserve the mayor’s right to appoint a majority of the members of the board that advises him on school matters.”

In the editorial, they also implicitly supported the mayor’s right to fire any of his appointees at will, at any time, for any reason – which ensured that the board would continue to act as a rubberstamp , no matter how destructive and/or irrational the mayor's decisions might be.

Yet somehow, on something really important, like state pensions, the Times editors realize that for the sake of true accountability, we should have an independent oversight board with members appointed by a variety of different elected leaders and state employees.

Why the apparent contradiction? Could it have anything to do with the fact that, according to this week’s New York magazine, Bloomberg has used his political power and personal fortune to buy the support of opinionmakers, and effectively owns this town, lock, stock, and barrel, including the publishers of the three major dailies?

The article starts off with a description of a dinner party Bloomberg recently gave for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

Johnson is in New York to promote U.K.-U.S. tourism. Bloomberg is a longtime Anglophile, and his company’s second-largest office is in London. The clearest sign that this Sunday evening holds special resonance for Bloomberg is the presence of Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publishers of New York’s three daily newspapers. They’re here because Bloomberg asked them to be. Those three are at anything that really matters to Mike, a dinner-party veteran says.

Indeed, in contrast with the past, when the business and media establishment were allowed to have different views from the mayor, this no longer occurs. Instead they all seem willing to serve as his lackeys.

The article describes how when Randi Weingarten tried to woo certain establishment figures to her side in her battle with Joel Klein, the mayor made it clear that “for business leaders, stepping forward and trying to become a civic leader would be at some risk to your relationship with the mayor, a corporate insider says. Only a crazy person would step out without Bloomberg’s say-so.”

So instead of a circle of wealthy and influential people who make policy in this town, there is one man alone, a billionaire who holds a monopoly on power. As the reporter writes:

…. there is a one-man Establishment: Michael Bloomberg. Certainly there are other figures with real power. But in a way that wasn’t true two decades ago, their influence is circumscribed, confined to their narrow categories: real estate, culture, health care, banking. And, in terms of civic life, little of their power exists independent of their relationships with Bloomberg. The mogul-class push for the mayor’s term-limits extension felt like the last gasp of what’s left of the city’s old-line ruling class….Bloomberg gets what he wants more than any mayor in modern memory. The foundation of Bloomberg’s imperial mayoralty is, obviously, money.

So much for checks and balances and the public having any say when it comes to our schools. Democracy in NYC: RIP.

What Joel Klein says about overcrowding and the capital plan

There’s an excellent article in NY Magazine this week, about the crisis of overcrowding and class size, as rising population pressures and development threatens to overwhelm our schools. An excerpt:

And when parents reared up to ask Joel Klein about the issue [of overcrowding] at a recent community-education-council meeting, they say his answer was succinct: “Send your kids to private school.” (Klein’s office flatly denies the remark, calling it “completely inconsistent with his values and obvious commitment to public education.”)

This was not just an isolated slip from Chancellor; I know at least one prominent elected official who was asked by Klein why she sends her child to a NYC public school.

The article focuses on PS 199 in D3, PS 116 in D2, and PS 321 in Brooklyn, but clearly, this is a problem happening all over the city.

Last night, at the Panel for Educational Policy monthly meeting, parents from PS 8 in Brooklyn Height complained that enrollment has tripled and their 2^nd and 3^rd grades now have class sizes of 30, with worse to come, because of the number of new buildings rising in their neighborhood.

Teachers at PS 373 in Staten Island, a special ed school for autistic children, spoke about how the overcrowding at their school has become so bad that all the classrooms had been divided in half, and still, there was no space for a “quiet room”, which is essential for calming autistic children when they lose control. A parent from D 24 in Queens spoke about the rampant overcrowding in her district; in one school, Kindergarten students have to be bussed to another district, and yet the school is officially rated as undercapacity.

I spoke as well last night and first reproved the Chancellor for having let the legal deadline for class size reporting lapse. I informed him that the DOE was now in violation of law by refusing to disclose this information. I then spoke about their new class size reduction proposal, just recently approved by the state, which calls for lowering average class size to no more than 20 in K-3 and no more than 23 in all other grades over the next five years.

This proposal represents a significant improvement – especially if achieved in all schools and communities citywide. But there is no room in our schools right now to accomplish these goals, and the current capital plan would need at least twice as many seats – about 120,000 – to make this possible.

According to my calculations, based on the cost estimates in the current capital plan, it would take about $138 million in annual payments to finance this number of seats, after 50% reimbursement from the state for new school construction. This amounts to less than 3% of last year’s surplus, and less than one seventh what the Mayor gave back in tax cuts last year. Yet if current trends continue, NYC will spend a smaller percentage of its capital budget on schools than at any time in more than ten years.

I asked Klein last night if he planned to expand the current capital plan to allow their state-mandated class size reduction plan to become a reality, or if his proposal was only a convenient fiction concocted to satisfy the state. Do you know what he said? He responded that he would love to have a better capital plan, but he had no control over the budget.

Talk about an excuse-based culture! Well, I don’t think this is good enough answer. It’s his job, and that of the Mayor, to provide the space so that smaller classes can become a reality.

The amended capital plan is coming up for comment before CECs in December. See my fact sheet and let your CEC know that they should demand a better capital plan – one that provides at least double the seats, and the space to fulfill the new state mandate for smaller classes in all grades.